We're rich! The Ithaca Communit Self-Reliance Center has
begun coordinating trade in Green Dollars. Your business and
employment income, and shopping pleasure, are about to rise if you are
any of these: an Ithaca with skills you enjoy but nobody pays oyou for,
short of cash, underpaid, overqualified, needing more customers, owing
half your life to the bank, disliking your job, laid off, on strike,
unemployed, or just wanting to meet people and have some fun.

Such problems have been solved elsewhere by Green Dollars, the currency
of the Local Exchange Trading System (LETSystem).
By the end of a meeting last month with system founder Michael Linton, 30 people had
agreed to pioneer LETS here.

"Conventional money goes where it makes the most profit: armament,
crime, speculation, land development," says Linton, whose visit was
sponsored by the Ithaca Alternatives Fund. Green Dollars,
however, are a "gift passed around the community that comes back to
employ you."

LETSplay

Here's how you use Green Dollars. First, call the
Self-Reliance Center and tell them the skills and goods you offer, and
the services and items you need. They tell their computer;
the computer prints a dfull community list of offers and
requests. This catalog is published monthly. The
Greenlist has more categories than a supermarket, the main ones being:
time; labor; services; local produce and food production; local goods
manufactured and repaired; shelter; land; accommodation; vehicles; buy,
sell and trade; shows; sports; societies; events; and commerce.

When you see something you want, call the person offering it.
Others will call you for your help, too. Say you offer family
counseling, carpentry, homemade jams and breads, four studded tires and
an antique couch. You're looking for dental work, firewood
and a weekly massage. Among the hundreds of listings (iwth 30
initial members there are already dozens in Ithaca's first catalog) you
find a masseuse who relaxes your aching back. But you can't
afford her every week, and the only thing you have that she wants is
your excellent whole wheat bread. Since an hojr of massage is
worth more than a loaf of bread, you agree to pay $5 in common Federal
Reserve notes, one loaf of bread, and 20 Green Dollars.

To record the transaction, you call the Self-Reliance Center and tell
the answering machine to credit 20 Green Dollars to the masseuse (her
name and LETS number) and take 20 Green Dollars from your own total.

Where did you get the Green Dollars? Not from a printing
press or bank. Green Dollars come from your willingness to
make the same kind of deal with somebody who needs your carpentry,
tires or couch. And the masseuse has your Green Dollars to
spend elsewhere for what she needs. LETS traders are the
bank. You're authorized to trade Green Dollars when you join
the LETSystem. Every month the Self-Reliance Center mails you
a computer print-out of your transactions and total Green Dollar
balance. So it goes: endless creative shopping, until the
Ithaca glacier returns.

More
Good Reasons

Linton has started LETS systems in Boston,
Toronto, Ottowa, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego, Vancouver and a dozen
other cities. "In Vancouver we were frustrated having to find
cash so
we decided to have our won omey," he says. He wrote the computer
program which keeps everything tidy, with the intention of creating
"money which was free-- could not be monopolized, was stable,
on-inflationary, safe, cheap, convenient, dignified and fun"

His theme at the Self-Reliance Center meetings was this: Whereas
federal currency chains Ithaca's wellbeing to federal banking and
investment policies, Green Dollars insulate us from recession by
boosting local interindependence. Federal dollars are papers
backed by
insufficient gold.

Green
Dollars are directly backed by real goods and services.
Therefore, when somebody owing federal dollars goes bankrupt, the
debtors lose. But if a Green Dollar debtor leaves Ithaca the
whole
LETS community takes the slack, and no harm is done.
"Economics is what we do and how we score it," Linton says.
"The LETSystem is simply part of the evolution of money from grains to
beads to gold to paper to magnetic computer patterns."

Bill Stearns, a local computer analyst whose hardware registers Ithaca
LETS trades, agrees with Linton. "The power of computers has
only recently become available to the general public," he says. "It has
long been a tool of big businesses for their purposes, sometimes used
against people. I'd like to see LETS allow people to work who
are not currently working, and others get what they need without taking
loans and paying interest, and bring us together on a one-to-one basis."

Marian Mollin, a director of the Ithaca Community Self-Reliance Center,
says the Center started the LETSystem here "because community
self-reliance means the community depending on itself, creating its own
fuel, food, and economic system."

"Ithaca is the ideal place to do this," she says. "There are
lots of overqualified, underpaid people, with more skills than
money. We already have a fairly large alternatives community,
with a lot of networks like GreenStar, the Alternatives Federal Credit
Union and other cooperative businesses."

GreenStar's finance manager, Art Godin, is one of several co-op workers
who have helped organize LETS locally. The Ithaca store
relies on member-workers more than most food co-ops, and Godin sees
LETS as a possible way to strengthen participation.

Any business, in fact, may enjoy more customers by accepting Green
Dollars as part of their percent markup. Richard Tripp, a
real estate agent, intends to rehab properties using labor of
prospective tenants who would then pay rent partly in Green
Dollars. Applying that rent to purchase of the home will
"give land back to users, rather than landlords," he says.

A ten-dollar yearly fee to the Self-Reliance Center covers costs of
computer time and monthly LETS mailings, and includes Center
membership, which delivers the monthly newsletter Sprouts!, offers
access to meeting space and free workshops.

For more information, or to join LETS, write or visit the Community
Self-Reliance Center. Very much like Ithaca's trees
mint gold, orange and red, the LETSystem begins to create local wealth,
and a sense of community, that (conventional) money can't buy.